Chasing own tail

Photo Taro the Shiba Inu @ Flickr

It's a depressive moment in everyone's life, chasing own tail. What this about in my case? When I want to move in career towards data science role. Not a big data, i.e., working with Hadoop, but real data science which is about statistics, data mining, data analysis, looking for patterns, feature extraction and so on. The issue is the  experience on some project.

Yes you most likely know it's this pattern:

1. There is no job without project experience
2. You can't get project experience without job

Oh, wait maybe I can break this infinite loop. How?

Every Data Scientist must only pay taxes and die, rest is just optional...

Picture from cacm.acm.org

I am just wondering. There are many articles about what every Data Scientist MUST know and do to be real Data Scientist. There are many articles about MUST not do as Data Scientist. What real Data Scientist MUST read and so on and so on. And honestly I don't care. Why is that so?

Research

Let's take the last one must: "What Data Scientist must read" list. I just briefly took several results from Google, here is the list of 10 of them:

• https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-list-of-books-that-every-data-scientist-should-read
• http://bigdata-madesimple.com/20-must-read-books-for-budding-data-scientists
• http://www.analyticsvidhya.com/blog/2015/06/infographic-read-books-analytics-data-science
• http://www.datasciencecentral.com/profiles/blogs/15-books-every-data-scientist-should-read
• http://www.mastersindatascience.org/blog/7-must-read-books-for-the-budding-data-scientist
• http://www.forbes.com/sites/gilpress/2015/03/31/3-recent-books-for-budding-data-scientists-and-business-executives-involved-with-big-data-analytics
• https://www.umbel.com/blog/big-data/must-read-big-data-books
• http://analyticstraining.com/2014/five-must-reads-for-data-scientists
• https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-must-reads-for-data-science-and-machine-learning
• http://www.analyticsvidhya.com/blog/2015/06/infographic-read-books-analytics-data-science

And what is this quick research good for? From this circa 80 books and list of several articles you get list of subjective chosen resources which lead practically to nowhere. Just several books repeating like famous Nate Silvers Signal and Noise and of course some R or other Cookbooks. So, what is conclusion?

Conclusion

This lists of books which someone else read leads me always to Vincent Granville's article Fake data science. And what you need to take from it? Pick any book you need for your field of expertise. And what should be your field of expertise? Choose some project, doesn't matter if your personal one, school or for instance from Kaggle.com. And follow up approaches which you need to for goal achievement, then pick book, course to support your path towards this goal. And by real work, life experience you will sooner or later become Data Scientist.